CPS’ Pay for Success. Putting a face on it. Sadie Stockdale.

Chicago Public School has adopted the Pay for Success program funded with Social Impact Bonds.

As I have written here before, Social Impact Bonds partner investors and corporate philanthropies in profit-making ventures in the public sector.

In a post written for this blog, special education advocate and activist Bev Johns wrote:

Pay for Success has been used in Utah to prevent 99 percent of children supposedly headed for special education from actually being identified for special education, and paid Goldman Sachs and other investors for each child NOT placed in special education. This is a huge financial incentive to NOT identify children as needing special education, and there is absolutely no research stating 99 percent of students in special education should not be there.

In Chicago, Pay for Success may allow Goldman Sachs to double its investment, depending on how many students are NOT identified for special education.

And Catalyst reported:

When the first cohort of students enters kindergarten, CPS will begin paying the lenders for each fewer child who needs special education services when compared to the control group. CPS will pay $9,100 per child annually, an amount that increases by 1 percent each year.

Just to be clear: Goldman Sachs, a giant Wall Street investment firm, will receive over $9000 every year for each identified child that does not receive special education services at CPS.

When Sadie Stockdale came to CPS from her previous work at Teach for America where she was Director of Recruitment she came to do Goldman Sachs’ work.

From Sadie’s Linked In resume:

I thought you might want to see the name and face and past of the current education policy advisor to the Mayor.

edTPA and TFA are two sides of the same coin.

Teach For America thinks you can put anybody in front of a classroom after a few weeks of boot camp training and they can fill the increasingly growing number of classroom teaching positions that cannot be filled by those from traditional teacher preparation programs.

TFA leaders think education majors are a waste of time.

TFA supplies teachers mainly for schools with poor students and students of color.

In a few cases this works.

Some people are born to teach.

But it is not sustainable and teachers leave TFA in a few years, creating a revolving door of inexperienced teachers.

edTPA also thinks traditional teacher preparation programs are lacking. They will argue that TFA and traditional teacher preparation programs undermine the professional status and quality of our classroom teachers.

They believe – and I have gotten an earful (or rather, Tweetful) this week – that licensure of teachers should look more like the fields of medicine and law.

This has not come from student teachers who have been victims of edTPA. It has come from university people who work for and with edTPA.

They got mad when I mentioned Bill Gates.

Gates is all over Stanford’s SCALE, but not edTPA, they tell me.

Fine. Whatever.

I’m told that in New York and Illinois the problem isn’t with edTPA and their 45 teacher functions that appear on their Stanford created rubric.

I’m told the problem is implementation.

It seems the problem is always implementation.

These university researchers have great ideas that just can’t seem to get implemented right.

Even our unions, when they defend Common Core, say the problem with Common Core is implementation.

PARCC testing?

Implementation.

Clearly we have a continuing problem with implementation.

I get it that Stanford’s SCALE and edTPA folks think that if we don’t build a wall of rubrics, the folks at the National Council on Teacher Quality and TFA will end up sending an army of untrained people into classrooms.

Yet edTPA is having a similar impact. The more hoops we create for student teachers to jump through, fewer of them will be willing to make the leap.

And then we will have the situation we are already starting to see in states with teacher shortages. Provisionally certified teachers in classrooms.

That means they don’t know anything about teaching.

45 checks on lists of teacher functions on a edTPA rubric doesn’t make anyone teacher-ready on their first day on the job. Yet that is their claim.

In my experience, it takes five years before you know what the questions are.

Experience teaching and reflecting on that experience is what makes good teachers.

A rubric of 45 teacher functions? On most days I did 45 teacher functions before noon.

Yes, there is a problem with Pearson’s connections to all this.

Yes, I am sure there are implementation problems.

But it is the conception of teaching as a mostly technical enterprise that can be mastered in time for day-one that is at the root of what is wrong with edTPA.

Waiting for Kryptonite VIII.

I know I said the last one would be the last one and it isn’t going to be the last one. Maybe this one is the last one. Maybe not. teacherken writing on Daily Kos has what he calls some rambling thoughts about the faux doc Waiting for Superman and the NBC Education Summit.

Now consider the following.
The Oprah Winfrey Show is distributed by CBS Television Studios
(subsidiary of Viacom/National Amusements) and “Waiting for Superman”
(W4S) is  distributed by Paramount vantage (subsidiary of
Viacom/National Amusements).  Winfrey has been heavily touting the movie
on her show.

Tom Friedman, McKinsey and TFA.

Tom Friedman

This morning’s NY Times has a column from Tom Friedman.

Friedman has been wrong on so many issues. He is mighty lucky the NY Times doesn’t use a pay-for-performance model. Poor Tom would be eating at a food kitchen tonight.

Big example: It was Friedman who was an early cheerleader for the war in Iraq.

Today he claims he knows what to do about public schools. He wants us to hand them over to the likes of Teach for America. He is wowed by the TFA model where urban schools are staffed by young kids for a couple of years before they move on to their real career.

He knows this is a good model  because data from the smartest guys in the room, the consulting firm of McKinsey, suggests it is a good model.

That is the conclusion I drew from a new study by the consulting firm McKinsey, entitled “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools.”

McKinsey has its own problematic track record. When Tom was waving the bloody flag to invade Iraq, McKinsey was coaching Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling at Enron. They created the blue print for Enron. Remember Enron?

In an article in the New Yorker a few years ago, writer Macolm Gladwell wrote:

The reputations of Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay, the company’s two top executives, have been destroyed. Arthur Andersen, Enron’s auditor, has been driven out of business, and now investigators have turned their attention to Enron’s investment bankers. The one Enron partner that has escaped largely unscathed is McKinsey, which is odd, given that it essentially created the blueprint for the Enron culture.

Friedman, McKinsey and TFA’s Wendy Kopp. There’s a trifecta worth betting on.

UPDATE: For more on Friedman and Kinsey, click on Clay Burell’s blog over on the right.